Possibly triggering stuff this chapter?? Sorry y'all times have not been kind- there's art at the beginning but the catchup will be long

Stuff to look out for: death, poor mental health, poor physical health, being injured, basically I'm struggling and I'll warn again before I get super in-depth with those things

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Here's this that I did, got random late night inspiration (actually I was catching up on YouTube lol)

Inspired by this map BIG TIME PLS GIVE IT MORE LOVE:

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So many talented animators worked on this and we're still under 300 views? That's ridiculous, go watch it a million times like I did and will continue to do.

This is cursed, I made it, take it

Think I might've drawn a few sketches traditionally??? Idk they're probably all just doodles somewhere hidden in my papers

We're gonna get right into business: I'm probably gonna be taking a break from Wattpad for a while. I love y'all and I love it here and honestly I never expected to be doing this, but things are all picking up and happening so fast and I'm reading so many people's art books that I think I need a breather and a chance to not feel bad about not being able to support everyone at the level they deserve. I accidentally took two days off and I had almost 140 notifications, if that tell you anything about how active I normally am on here even when posting becomes more scarce-

I'm sorry everyone; things are only gonna get more difficult from here.

I might still come on to chat with people or catch up a bit where I can, and who knows how long this break will last honestly it could end up being like only another two days. I love you all and I'm sorry I gotta be disappearing for a bit like this but you'll see why

Gonna talk about the forewarned topics now (death, poor mental health, poor physical health, and being injured). Skip if that's going to make you uncomfortable or upset.

First things first, last Thursday. I decided I wanna let you all know what happened, since it'll make things confusing without that info.

I was punched twice in my costume

Thankfully it wasn't hard enough to physically hurt me, and it's been reported (I'll get back to that) and my school is sort of looking into it (they're kinda bad with this stuff though not gonna lie). Both times I was going places on my own, and both times it was by strangers. I didn't see either person, and I believe that it only happened because I was wearing the costume that day and it wasn't about me specifically. This is why I warned about injury; I didn't wanna call this assault even though it can be argued..? But yeah, that happened.

The first punch was to the bill of the headpiece and wasn't at my actual body, the second was to the back of my head. I was concerned mostly because my costume became popular, there was a costume contest, and if I was chosen as a winner for it then my name would be announced and people would know who I was and possibly have a way to target me. It sounds kind of a stretch, but it really can be something as simple as that and it's happened to me before. I haven't been able to feel comfortable walking anywhere alone since then while I'm at school, and while I logically know there isn't anything to fear for some reason my body and emotional part of my mind have decided that that won't cut it. I had to wait outside a room on Monday, inside the actual office part of my school away from other students, and I was shaking and almost had a breakdown. Talking about walking alone today at lunch my friend felt me starting to shake as well.

I really am okay from that, though. Hopefully it's something that'll relax with time, and some of my friends have been making sure to walk with me places (I only directly told two of them but I think one told someone else who I walk most classes with). It's also only been two days that I've been back in school since I didn't have school on Friday.

Next, the reason I warned about death. Again, here's your warning and chance to leave/skip. I tried to ask about seeing a counselor with my connection (a teacher who has offered for us to come and see him and he'll send a message for a counselor to pull us out of class if needed so we can talk), and he said that they'd be really busy yesterday and only if it was a really important thing. Come to my first class, and we're told a teacher at our school has died. I never had him, but I surely saw him in the hallways and I was in the same environment as him.

They brought in counselors from the other schools sharing mine's name, but one of our counselors was absent and there was a LOT of crying done that day (reasonably so). There were so many people, when I went to visit the counselor I ended up with one of the visiting ones and got brought in with a girl who was crying and really upset about the teacher. It took a solid minute before I got to explain that I was there for another reason, and then since it was personal she had me wait outside the door (where I ended up shaking like I said). I felt awful taking her time when people were literally grieving like that.

She had me fill out an incident report and sent me back after I told her about the stuff on Thursday, and I checked to make sure there was nothing else I should be doing and went back to class. They tried to call me out of class during math to meet and talk with someone about the incident, and my math teacher actually said no so they said they'd send for me next class (which they didn't) so I went after talking to my English teacher about it at the end of her class. The walk there was still very much not fun and extremely stressful. Eventually the lady who had called me down got there and we talked for a bit, and I went back to my last class.

After school yesterday I went to my second session of math tutoring. I'm having outside of school math tutoring now because it's that much of a struggle, but it actually doesn't seem to be helping yet because we're at the point where the math is about using the right formula and figuring out how to use it; it's basically like another language. The main guy I've been working with is really nice, if too enthusiastic about material this confusing, but we used the wrong formula on my work or something because even after I finally understood it all when I checked the answers today they were all wrong. There's been a lot of near-breakdowns lately.

The only pro to this situation is that I'm not the only one failing horrendously so there's that..? Most of my class is just as confused as I am. But my lack of focus has become a REALLY bad problem now, and it's not the "my mind is daydreaming" kind of lack of focus because I can't reel myself back in. I've slept through a whole math class, I almost started falling asleep during an anatomy test, and I even started to loose focus while DRIVING recently. (We now have agreed that I'm gonna let whoever I'm with know when that happens and honestly I'm probably gonna pull over if it starts to happen again and I'll ask someone to come drive me/whoever is with me instead)

We think it's stress related, but I haven't had any more testing done since over the summer and we haven't been able to see anyone yet so it's still up in the air. At least when it happened driving it was under unusual circumstances so driving to/from school has thus far been okay. We also had several more health scares from my grandfather; he was hospitalized again and then after that had to go to emergency care but he's doing fine right now (though he and my grandmother won't be traveling anywhere for a good while). And my Gala (choir performance) that was supposed to be this Saturday is being postponed to January or February of next year because there's going to be a funeral service now in Saturday for the teacher.

Yesterday I wasn't fully home until after eight at night because of school and tutoring and a meeting about getting help for doing college related things. By the time I got home just for fifteen minutes in between tutoring and leaving for the college meeting even standing after saying hi to Tucker caused me to almost burst into tears. So I'm gonna be pretty busy if we decide to go with tutoring for the rest of the year, and with how many notifications I get on here it's not worth it to only be able to support people 25% and leave myself further drained.

I've been talking with people like Pearl and Dorky and a few people I know personally because all that is WAY too much for me to try to keep in in ANY way that would be even remotely healthy, but my mental health is still taking quite the hit and the changing of seasons isn't helping anything. For those who are newer to my stuff, first of all thanks for reading this and second I have a lot of signs of seasonal affective disorder (the changing of seasons to winter causes my mind to become WAY more easily depressed and my mental health takes a hit even if things are fine in my life), which runs in my family, and over the past few years I've had my mental health become worse around this time as I lose a LOT of motivation (that I'm already lacking-).

My friend group is also having a crazy unreasonable amount of drama for NO REASON and I really think a split is gonna happen soon which I'm not looking forward to. I don't know when the people I'm close with became the kind of people I never wanted to be around, gossiping and not talking to settle petty random feuds, but somehow here we are. I never EVER want to be around people who talk about other people behind their back about things they'd never say to their face, and a single relationship has somehow become the whole group's focus and the next time I hear about it I'm putting my foot down and telling them I don't wanna be around for that. It's dumb. 

My two closest irl friends are also having individual major issues, including more struggling mental health, so I have trouble going to talk to them pretty often (and one already just isn't a good person when it comes to stuff like this), but I promise I'm still trying my best here to fight myself on some of the bad things that are trying to come back to me, even if I'm not always winning. It's really hard, but I'm still trying.

I don't know who'd read this far, but if you have thank you. You didn't have to do that, and yet here you are. Maybe you even took breaks in between, or skipped certain parts, but I truly appreciate you reading and everyone who I know cares about me and is going to be sad to know about all of this. In the end that's why I'm taking a break, and I hope I'll be able to say that I'll be back in the swing of things soon.

IN SUMMARY: I'm taking a break, a teacher at my school died, the incident from Thursday was that I got punched twice, math is increasingly difficult, I'm too busy, the incident made me have unfounded anxiety walking alone, there's friend group drama, and my mental health is poor.

Oh, also in the chaos of Monday with the teacher's death over the weekend my incident report got shredded by mistake and I might have to rewrite it at some point but I wrote down a paper about all I could remember after and they have a copy of that still (and I have the original). Everything's a mess.

I love you all so much, and thank you for being the amazing people you are. It's because of you all being the incredible people that I know you are that I'm comfortable sharing all of this in the first place, and I hope you all understand my need for a break that will hopefully be longer than a week like most others I've taken-

Take care of yourselves; self-care can do a lot to save you! (Shower and eat and drink enough water even if it's hard to motivate or only a little at a time; it makes a world of difference and it's okay to not do things perfectly or completely because even a little is better than nothing!)
💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙💙
-Cavy
(11/5/19)